You can see in the early light of dawn
Facing the noise of the so-called Twilight
Bright stars through the perilous fight, and a wide range of his lines and
Flow because we are bold, fluttering looking at the wall?
The rockets red light, and bombs, and the explosion in the air,
Evidence throughout the night that we learned he was still;
O Star Spangled Banner still wave
Fluttering bravest of the land of the free world?

(“The Star Spangled Banner” first stanza, Google translated from English to Chinese to Russian to Korean to Arabic to English.)

This seems wise & articulates something I’ve been thinking for a long time now, so I thought I’d share it.

Fiction’s abyss is silence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is Total Noise, the seething static of every particular thing and experience, and one’s total freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.

That’s David Foster Wallace, from his introduction to one of the Best American Essay series.

Yet five minutes after…I realized I had not actually seen the three plants in the little colony we had found. Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing. I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having-looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking. If I had the courage, I would have asked her to turn and drive back, because I knew I had fallen, in the stupidest possible way, into an ancient trap. It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result.

My second year at Iowa, I lived with three poets in a farmhouse out on Taft Ave SE.

Here’s a fake painting of it, complete with cut-and-paste signature. (It had been moved to that location some years before and so had no trees around it. Kind of creepy, huh?)

It’s gone now, or moved. Apparently, the owner’s son liked it so much he moved it around the corner and fixed it up for himself.

One of the understood duties of the farmhouse tenants was that we would have to throw a couple good parties every year, including at Halloween.

Being involved somewhat in the set-up of said bash, I didn’t have too much time to work on a costume. I found a cardboard box downstairs in the cellar and made it up to look like a TV set. Then I put on a blazer and tie, and I did my best to look like a news anchor, a talking head, complete with shorts.

We had a rubber rat lying around, so I added him to the costume, too, tying him to my blazer with a short “leash” of string.

Here’s the costume:

You can see the rat perched on top of the TV, and the string leading down to my jacket button.

Fun costume, right? People seemed to think so. But in a way I never expected and could not have predicted, the rat, that little black rubber rat, became a litmus test like no other I’ve seen before or since.

Every single poet I spoke to that that night had something positive to say about the rat. From “Nice rat,” to “I love the rat,” to “The rat makes the costume.”

And every single fiction writer wanted to cut the rat, edit him out, or at least get some satisfactory explanation as to why he was there.

My friend Colin’s piece on migraines and the artwork of Renee French contains a reference to duck diving, along with a helpful link to this here blog.

So for those of you who clicked on the link, and for the rest of you, too, duck diving is a technique surfers use to get their shortboards under a breaking (or more likely already broken) wave. (Longboarders have to figure out another way.)

Anyhow, it works like this:

1. Paddle toward the broken wave, speed is your friend.
2. When you’re a few feet away, about to be run over by the whitewash, push down firmly on the front 1/3 of your board, so it’s now pointing down, headed underwater.
3. Push down on the tail of the board with your knee or foot. So the board is flat, and then pointing up again.
4. While this is happening, calmly let the wave pass over you.
5. Let the board’s flotation bring you to the surface again.

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as thinking you’re about to get crushed by a wave breaking just outside of where you are and then exiting out the back with a clean duck dive, especially if surfers to the right and left are spinning in circles or trying to retrieve bailed boards.

Back to Colin’s article. In his metaphor, the wave is a migraine, and he duck dives it.

Not bad for a non-surfer.

Except that I associate duck diving (in, say, 53 degree water) with some of the worst headaches I’ve ever had the displeasure of experiencing.

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antoine wilson * ** ***

* not my surfboard

** not my dog

*** not my apartment

panorama city

*New York Times Editors’ Choice*
*SF Chronicle Best of 2012*
*National Bestseller*

“This is a book you will hold in your head all day long, a book you will look forward to when you get home from work, a book you will still be savoring as you drift into sleep. Panorama City is often very funny. It is filled with joy and wonder, and a sort of goodness you had stopped believing might be even possible.